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A McDonald's in a Toronto, Ontario, Canada Wal-Mart store. Note the maple leaf on the Golden Arches. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday I mentioned that Starbucks has lost its place as the most social company in the restaurant business. Starbucks' loss is McDonald's gain But how did McDonald's do it?

The answer seems to be pretty straightforward - transparency. During the second half of 2012 McDonald's ran a well trailed campaign to open up to its public, including videos of behind the scenes at the restaurants and an open invitation to ask questions on any aspect of the McDonald's food chain.

McDonald's now leads Starbucks in the social league table, up from number 7 in Q3 2012.

McDonald's social reputation and audience began to rise, according to Paul Barron at DigitalCoCo, because of its transparency campaign. And the rise was impressive.

McDonald's rose almost 17 points over the past two quarters in consumer sentiment part of which has contributed to their approach to number one. Additionally the brands growth on Twitter and Facebook, two of the 16 platforms we analyze, almost tripled the growth of Starbucks. Additionally social consumer engagement also took a turn for the better for McD at a rise of 5 points in a single quarter.

....the fast food chain has launched a website called "Our Food. Your Questions." A press release claims that the site "promotes radical transparency using the same channels that perpetuated negative myths about McDonald’s food quality." The site has received over 5,000 questions and has a dedicated 10-member "social media response team" to answer the questions through text, photos and video.

McDonald’s Canada was aware that people were asking these and other much tougher questions about its food online. Rather than ignore the elephant--or in this case, the giraffe in the room--last year, the company decided to confront the online speculation head-on with an interactive digital campaign designed to answer consumers’ questions and dispel myths. In an era when transparency and conversation have become the most aspirational hallmarks of marketing, McDonald’s Canada’s efforts have become one of the most interesting ongoing campaigns of the last while.

Over the first part of that period the McDonald's share price has varied between $84 and $94, first rising and then falling and now rising again.

There's clearly no direct link between rising social engagement and the stock price, though as McDonald's has consolidated its social position its share price has come back.

What we've also seen is that its social reputation across America improved significantly because of a campaign in Canada. And I think that too is a lesson - the news amplification you create, as much as the campaign itself, that matters.Without the campaign being taken up in American media I doubt its impact would have been so pronounced.

Even so, McDonald's didn't get extensive Tier 1 coverage, which leads you to think that in fact the social dimension is now becoming more self-contained, with less and less dependency on traditional media channels taking up the story. Social is standing on it own two feet.